Lets Talk About Ancestors Legacy!

Ancestors Legacy is free on Steam for the weekend and I decided now would be a good time to try the game out to see if it’s for me. I usually stay away from RTS games, but anything with vikings is something I’ll want to try at least once.

Ancestors Legacy made a very solid first impression on me and screwed it up on the very next mission. I chose the vikings as my starting army, watched a really cool cutscene, and was immediately thrust into my first battle. The game runs smooth as butter on my rig on all ultra settings, the animations are great, and the voice acting isn’t bad. The first mission was a tutorial, but it was an awesome tutorial. I got to sack my first village/garrison and burn a church to the ground. As I was burning the village people starting running towards the church for safety… that false safety didn’t last very long and I torched the place. You could hear the people screaming, “oh god!” as the flames burned them alive. Right away I knew I wasn’t playing as the “good” guys. I was really looking forward to the next mission and it sucked my happiness away like a vacuum on full blast. It’s a forced stealth mission that had me controlling a single unit while dodging guards on patrol. The problem with that is I can’t see past a certain point and most times I would be taken by complete surprise and gutted before I had a chance to retreat to safety.

The retreat function is also really shitty. My unit would just dash in a direction and not stop no matter how many times I clicked a different area around them to try and make them stop. This means that every unit that I skillfully avoided to get to my objective would see me retreating and give chase. It quickly annoyed me and made me want to quit the game. Well… I did quit the game because it was no longer fun. I’ll pick it up again tomorrow and force myself through that shitty stage, but I’m not looking forward to it. There are games like this that does stealth excellently. Shadow Tactics: Blades of the Shogun is a great example here. This game isn’t a stealth game so it shouldn’t force stealth mechanics on me. Just let me do massive battles and I’ll be happy. Sacking villages, killing soldiers, and commanding my troops in battle is what I downloaded this game for. Don’t take that away from me.

I have mixed feelings on this game right now. I’m glad I didn’t just buy it because it was on sale and I didn’t let the fancy trailers suck me into it. I’m going to take my time and play through this free weekend and then make my decision. The gameplay, outside of the stealth segment, is great. I really enjoyed it and I love how well done the animations are. I can zoom and see the action up close and watch my units murder villagers and soldiers while throwing torches at everything made out of wood.

Have you played Ancestors Legacy? What do you think of it? Are you an RTS fan? What’s your favorite RTS game?